Is job-hopping really OK? Do you still need a cover letter? We talked to the experts to find out what matters in hiring.

Miklos Szilagyi's insight:

The (almost) obsolete list:

1. Your cover letter. – It’s your CV what they are checking…

2. Where you went to school. – “you want to dial up the skills . . . those things jump out far more than your grad school.”

3. Where you used to work. – Well, it depends… but ““We’re seeing more cross-pollination among industries than ever before,”

The new list:

1. Your research chops. - “…now that anybody can easily look up the going rates for specific roles, levels of experience, and geographical regions on sites like Glassdoor, PayScale, and Indeed.com, failing to benchmark yourself can look sloppy.” & “do the research on the recruiters you will be talking to” so you can ask smarter questions about their needs and objectives during your interview. At a minimum, it’s now pretty much expected that you’ll have checked out your interviewer’s LinkedIn profile ahead of time the same way they’ve definitely checked out yours.

2. Too much job-hopping (in most cases) – but “it depends”…

3. How you talk about your career - control the narratives about their careers. “A job seeker has to be able to tell their story and tell how one thing relates to another,”

It's been largely assumed that to run a successful business today, good leadership is required. But it's not the end of the world for leaders who worry that they're low on charisma or can't stir employees' hearts and minds. Maybe they don't particularly want to, and that's OK too.

Sometimes, it's more effective for employees to be more loyal to the work instead of being more loyal to the leader. After all, the end goal should be to keep employees engaged and productive by charging them to solve compelling problems.

First, it's important to understand the difference between an appealing boss and challenging work. A recent Harvard Business Review article found that employees at Facebook were more likely to quit because of their work--and not because of a "horrible" boss. The authors--three HR executives and Wharton professor Adam Grant--had spent years studying Facebook. When the social media giant started tracking employee exits, "all bets were on managers," the authors wrote. Turns out, employees left "when their job wasn't enjoyable, their strengths weren't being used, and they weren't growing in their careers."

About the burnout and how to avoid it very briefly and in everyday language... There are stages and there are differences within each stage, therefore it would be impossible to say what to do in actual cases... this might help to identify where somebody is on the scale, if at all he/she started to realise that the danger is around him/her... and if you think that you are on the burnout bandwagon, let it be any of the stages, it is advisable to turn to experts...

Does adaptation lead to a molecular Darwinism? Le Chatelier’s principle is neither hard to state nor to understand. But it’s kind of hard to find the right words. It’s typically expressed as something like: ‘If a dynamic equilibrium is disturbed by changing the conditions, the position of equilibrium moves to counteract the change.’ But there is a clear implication of intentionality here: it’s as though the system is determined to keep its balance. Sometimes, Le Chatelier’s principle is more or less equated with homeostasis in physiology – the maintenance of a steady state in a changing environment. Some homeostasis, such as pH regulation, does indeed involve the kind of shift in chemical equilibria described by Le Chatelier’s principle. The confusing thing is that biological homeostasis is also a survival mechanism and therefore connected to Darwinian adaptation. We have evolved sweat glands, yet the regulation of body temperature by sweating can be explained by purely physical laws. What this really means is that ‘adaptation to the environment’ has more than one meaning. It can refer to the gradual accommodation to a niche explained by natural selection in self-replicating systems, or to the instantaneous response to fluctuating environmental conditions due to physicochemical principles. These two processes interact, but one might have thought we could keep them distinct. After seeing a paper by Jordan Horowitz and Jeremy England of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US, I’m not so sure.

Highly sophisticated piece (on the base (and extrapolating from) of a specified chemical experiment) about 2 things: (1) whether evolution is explaining evolution or some more basic physical/chemical/biological processes are also there to act and (for me at least) (2) whether equilibrium states are so general and universal we think they are... About point (2)... just thinking about it some days whether human race is not being left behind by the technological environment (in work and in privat life) it created itself on the first place... It seems to me that we are just living the moment of finally and irreversibly leaving our possibility to ever find a new balance in our life... not because we are individually not capable of finding it but because our constitution's incapability...

Understanding sarcasm could help AI fight racism, abuse, and harassment. The researchers originally aimed to develop a system capable of detecting racist posts on Twitter. But they soon realized that the meaning of many messages couldn’t be properly understood without some understanding of sarcasm. The algorithm uses deep learning, a popular machine-learning technique that relies on training a very large simulated neural network to recognize subtle patterns using a large amount of data. The secret to training this algorithm was that many tweets already use something like a labeling system for emotional content: emoji. Once they took advantage of this to help the system read tweets for emotion in general, the researchers had a head start in teaching it to recognize sarcasm.

A list of the skills that most strongly influence performance reviews.

Miklos Szilagyi's insight:

...that is, in most of the cases... why on earth is it so difficult to give feedback?! Of course, I know... arrogance ("they are here for working, aren't they?! Why to do so much fuss about this?!"), real or felt incompetence (impostor syndrome: they are just happy that still nobody hasn't discovered that the coat/post is too much, too complicated for them)... we could reengineer this whole thing backwards: those leaders/managers who do not in a demonstrable way do informal/development-focused feedback or rather feed forward, should be dismissed... by bosses who also not strong in giving useful informal feedbacks?! Hmmm... it looks like a wrong cycle... or, one of the necessary & sufficient operating characteristic of a good/result-oriented boss that the people reporting them do not fear what he/she think about them... iit's an effectiveness issue

We propose a theory of inattention solely based on preferences, absent cognitive limitations or external costs of information. Under disappointment aversion, agents are intrinsically information averse. In a consumption-savings problem, we study how information averse agents cope with their fear of information, to make better decisions: they acquire information at infrequent intervals only, and inattention increases when volatility is high, consistent with the empirical evidence. Adding state-dependent alerts following sharp downturns improves welfare, despite the additional endogenous information costs. Our framework accommodates a broad range of applications, suggesting our approach can explain many observed features of decision under uncertainty

I just go one step further.... Have you met guys who are brilliant on gamification (in the old times simple training games) and they are just not there for real work? They love playing but they hate working... more common than you just think now...

Everyone wants you to be happy: Self-help books dish out advice on how to stop worrying, boost happiness, and banish negative thoughts; bosses want to see smiling enthusiasm in the workplace; and the only way to respond to “how are you?” is with a joyful “great!” But according to Svend Brinkmann, a psychology professor at Denmark'

Miklos Szilagyi's insight:

When something is too much on one side there will always come the other side as well... when something valuable is profanised by too many, too superficial people, there will come somebody saying: stop that nonsense... Waiting for the book...:-)))

Here are 12 work/life balance strategies to provide at least a few new ideas for every entrepreneur.

Miklos Szilagyi's insight:

Most important is: plan thoroughly your 2nd QTR (important but not urgent) activities as well, i.e. the appointments with yourself... and not only the appointments with others... if you don't do it, there will be no remaining time for them... see?

Imagine having to face something scary or imagining a new possible future that you’re contemplating pursuing. How is your mind? If you’re anything like me, there’s one thing it’s not. Quiet. Usually…

Miklos Szilagyi's insight:

Voice of judgement (VoJ), voice of cynicism (VoC) and voice of fear (VoF)... the three inner voices...

Each has a tendency to block something in us (or at least to make it difficult for us to act)... Generally when the action/decision/compassion are needed perhaps the most... E.g. when thinking on something a little bit scary or simply just on the future...

We might be very accustomed to these voices and very often we do not even detect them and their effects... if we knew more about them, how they operate, we could detect the cause backwards/deduce the reason from the effect... The more of our energy goes astray (e.g. we are often very tired even if it is not justifiable), the more plausible that our inner voices have taken the power over us...

Leaders should view change not as an occasional disruptor but as the very essence of the management job. Setting tough goals, establishing processes to reach them, carrying out those processes and carefully learning from them — these steps should characterize the unending daily life of the organization at every level. More companies need to describe their work in terms of where they are trying to go in the next month or next quarter or next year.

I like David Hain's insight that change is the work For me though only part of the story In terms of management today that's about processes and things associated. Change management is an oxymoron It's part of the hangover from the Industrial Revolution where people in power believe they could control people and things. They were wrong!

Interesting points... always speaking about the loss of workplaces due to Ai-ing the production & services but there are other possibilities as well, really dangerous ones... what about e.g. when full AI stormtroopers are going to war?!

Courts, banks, and other institutions are using automated data analysis systems to make decisions about your life. Let’s not leave it up to the algorithm makers to decide whether they’re doing it appropriately. ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize–winning nonprofit news organization, had analyzed risk assessment software known as COMPAS. It is being used to forecast which criminals are most likely to ­reoffend. Guided by such forecasts, judges in courtrooms throughout the United States make decisions about the future of defendants and convicts, determining everything from bail amounts to sentences. When ProPublica compared COMPAS’s risk assessments for more than 10,000 people arrested in one Florida county with how often those people actually went on to reoffend, it discovered that the algorithm “correctly predicted recidivism for black and white defendants at roughly the same rate.” But when the algorithm was wrong, it was wrong in different ways for blacks and whites. Specifically, “blacks are almost twice as likely as whites to be labeled a higher risk but not actually re-offend.” And COMPAS tended to make the opposite mistake with whites: “They are much more likely than blacks to be labeled lower risk but go on to commit other crimes.” Things reviewed “Machine Bias” ProPublica, May 23, 2016 “COMPAS Risk Scales: Demonstrating Accuracy Equity and Predictive Parity” Northpointe, July 8, 2016 “Technical Response to Northpointe” ProPublica, July 29, 2016 “False Positives, False Negatives, and False Analyses: A Rejoinder to ‘Machine Bias’” Anthony Flores, Christopher Lowenkamp, and Kristin Bechtel August 10, 2016 Courts, banks, and other institutions are using automated data analysis systems to make decisions about your life. Let’s not leave it up to the algorithm makers to decide whether they’re doing it appropriately.

Well, and it's only an example... we are guided/controlled/selected/rejected/etc. acc. to results of algorythms on many (if not all of the...) areas... i.e. we are finally submitted to programmers/coders final logic/thinking... if we are not able to check, monitor & veto on some meta-levels the working of these algirithms (are we guys?!), then, well, one thing remains: to pray...

One of the worst elements of the hiring process is the traditional and tribal reliance on job descriptions. They are worthless useless as a predictor and management tool for performance - as they are typically used in most organizations. There must be a better way!

Dear reader, today we have a special post - a guest post from Naomi. She has indeed written a masterpiece for you and this is her first blog. I have never met Naomi face to face. Our paths crossed as our common friend John Wheeler introduced us one to another, saying we might be a…

Miklos Szilagyi's insight:

Rejection as a resource, as a new starting point, as like more knowing what's around us, as like more owning what is useful to us & what helps us become our better version... solution focused thinking in its prime... beautiful...

Abstract The present essay focuses on the fast and frugal heuristics program set forth by Gerd Gigerenzer and his fellows. In particular it examines the contribution of Gigerenzer and Goldstein (1996) ‘Reasoning the Fast and Frugal Way: Models of Bounded Rationality’. This essay, following the theoretical propositions and the empirical evidence of Gigerenzer and Goldstein, points out that simple cognitive mechanisms such as fast and frugal heuristics can be capable of successful performance in real world, without the need of satisfying the classical norms of rational inference.

Most trainings fall down because we leave it up to the employee to go back and change their behavior when they go back to an environment that’s already rigged to have them execute the old habit,” she explained. “If they don’t have some intentionality, some chances to develop repetitions of doing it correctly, all the best intentions in the world will fall down.

It's about the durable maintenability, or the proficiency of putting into practice the human development (training, coaching, etc.)... I would add four remarks:

1. It helps a lot if the leader/manager still before the development shows a genuine interest, even enthusiasm about the development process. Then the participant will know that it is important, he/she should be easier motivated because the workplace is waiting eagerly his/her new or more finetuned skill.

2. During the training/coaching the facilitator should make it possible that the participants have an as passionate as possible experience, either at the theory as at the practice part. I know, it's not an easy task but without it the money for the development is just thrown out of the window because nobody is learning on purely cognitive basis. If the heart is not there it simply run through without any seeable imprint, if a sort of flow/joy wasn't there, the topics handled are quickly fading...

3. At the end, still during the practice a sort of agreement should be facilitated among the participants (or in case of a personal coaching with the leader/manager and/or with some coworkers) how they exactly will practice in the everyday working relationships what they learned.

4. After the reinsertion somehow the environment and the participants themselves should be informed and asked for mutual accountability warning in case somebody would fall back into the old habits...

And you know what? All these are just simple common sense, you do not need for any neuroscience smartness. Of course, it works only if you do it accordingly...

Yeah... it's too easy to say that, and thinking, "I'm an approachable, open person... if they do not come that's their problem... I have told them..." ...and there is another problem with this 24/7 invitation: if they take it really seriously, you would have no time to think, to plan undisturbingly... Either way: it's not a good idea... there are more to be close/open to your reports, leave this ancien slogan alone...

Change champions tend to pay attention to the upside of their future vision and the downside of today’s status quo. For example, those who are passionate about customers are hyper-focused on building relationships for the long term. To them, resistors seem greedy or blind.

Conversely, resistors pay attention to the downside of the change and the upside of the current state. They see the risks. When change champions refuse to discuss an issue, resistors assume they are hopelessly naive or sinister actors trying to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes. To them, it can seem fiscally reckless to divert attention from the financial aspects of the business to softer issues such as customer experience. Which of them is right? “They both are,” says Jacobs. “But each is only half-right.”

In the worst-case scenario, “us versus them” thinking devolves into factions that compete but never really engage.

The solution is to reframe how we think about resistance. Rather than assuming critical thinkers are resistors, we would do better to treat them as guardians. Guardians see what needs to be protected, and the trust that can be destroyed by a broken promise or a shortcut. Who else will ask the hard questions?

The secret to the developing strategies to overcome burnout and achieve balance for life is to focus on the good habits to develop, not bad ones you need to

Miklos Szilagyi's insight:

"...Burnout is not caused by over-commitment as most people think. Burnout is caused by a lack of commitment to some very important aspects of life. Those areas include our health, our relationship, our finances and our spiritual well-being..."

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